Lady Georgiana Fane---High Society Stalker

It’s a truism that the higher you climb in society or show biz the more you have to lose to blackmailers or stalkers. But this is not a phenomenon of modern times. In a previous Jot it was shown how C. M. Westmacott, a gutter press editor of the Regency period, used his position to extract money from high society offenders. At around the same time the Duke of Wellington—since 1815, the most Famous Living Englishman—was a victim of a determined aristocrat by the name of Lady Georgiana Fane...

Born in 1801, Fane had first met Wellington just after the battle of Waterloo, when at the age of 14, she had danced with him at a ball. In her twenties, she became friendly with Lord Palmerston, who apparently proposed marriage to her. This shedeclined and instead turned her attention once more to the hero of Waterloo. Lady Georgiana, whose beauty was captured in two portraits by Thomas Lawrence, was also highly strung, possibly to the point of neurosis. When she features in the memoirs of her cousin, Lady Arbuthnot, Wellington’s confidante, she is often described as being chronically ‘ill’ and at one point Arbuthnot suspects that her indisposition was ‘almost entirely nervous’.  Nevertheless, Wellington seems to have become very fond of the young aristocrat and despite his marriage their friendship developed into romance,

A Sitwell Parody

Edith Sitwell by Roger Fry

Not sure where this came from but it is most likely to be from the voluminous papers of 'Evoe' - i.e. E. V. Knox. The poem parodied Colonel Fantock (from Troy Park, Duckworth 1925) is actually one of Edith Sitwell's finest, but 'Evoe' has picked up on her and her brothers' snobbery, haughtiness and pretentions. The full  original poem can be found here. It contains some beautiful lines and has elements of tragedy, or at least pathos:

 I was a member of a family

Whose legend was of hunting -- (all the rare

And unattainable brightness of the air) --

The parody dates from the early 1950s when it seems the Sitwells had become ubiquitous in British cultural life, possibly to a slightly  annoying extent in the way that some British celebrities (with vast tribes of twitter followers) are 60 years later.

THE THREE SITWELLS EXPLAIN HOW THEY

TRIUMPHED OVER OPPOSITION.

Osbert, the Author of "England Reclaimed", begins:

To us sad children in whose veins there ran
The violet blood of the old Angevin Kings
(1154 to 1216).
So that we all had Visi-Gothic faces
And seemed unreal in theatres and places –

Edith, the Author of "Troy Park", goes on:

I was a member of the family,
And from those tombed lords we inherited
A liking for wind-music – all the rare
Impetuous rapture of the trumpet blare.
I often think that cornet players only
Know what it is to be left entirely lonely.

Sacheverell, the Author of "All Summer in a day", breaks in:

The dulness of our life was terrible.
It had the remote air of a legend
Printed beneath a faded photograph
Of some one whom we did not wish to know.

Dummy Books for Duchesses

In the library of Chatsworth, the seat of the Dukes of Devonshire, are two doors disguised as shelves of books. The second one was created in the 1960s during renovations, and 28 book-backs were made by binders Sangorski & Sutcliffe, for titles like Reduced to the Ranks by D. Motion, Second Helpings by O. Twist, Dipsomania by Mustafa Swig, and The Battle of the Bulge by Lord Slim. The last volume was Book Titles by Patrick Leigh Fermor, in honour of the inventor of the titles. They were suggested to the Duchess in a letter from Fermor from Euboea dated February 1964. This was published in 2008 ( In Tearing Haste) by John Murray. Among  PLF's other candidates were:

          Knicknacks by  Paddy Whack
          Nancy Mitford & her Circle by Juno french
          Minor Rodents by Aygood-Mausser
          A Tommy in the Harem by Private Parts
          First Steps in Rubber by Wellington
          Flags of the Nations by Bunting
          Will Yam Make Peace? by Thackeray
          Consenting Adults by Abel N Willing
          Where the Hormones...by Christine Keeler  
          Venus Observed by I. Sawyer
          Intuition by Ivor Hunch
          Alien Corn by Dr. Scholl
          March Days by A. Hare
          Creme de la Creme by Devonshire
          K-K-Katie by Kay Stammers
          On the Spot by Leo Pard
          Humble Pie by J.Horner
          The Shaking Hand by Master Bates 
          Ruined Honeymoon by Mary Fitzgerald and Gerald 
          Fitzgeorge              
          The Day After Gomorrah by Bishop of Sodor and Man
          Call me X by Anon
          Pardon Me by Belcher
          Weather in the Streets by Omega Losches
          Haute Cuisine by the Aga Khan 
          The Babies Revenge by Norah Titsoff
          The Cat's Revenge by Claude Balls

Patrick Leigh Fermor confesses he has a soft spot for the rude ones 'though they're not your style.' Might follow up with more garnered from books, recommendations and the web. The most famous is, of course, Rusty Bedsprings by I.P Knightly. There are manufacturers of dummy bookshelves, mostly providing classic titles like the two vols below by one Ernest Hemmingway...

The real Downton Abbey

Every fan of ITV’s Downton Abbey will know that is filmed at Highclere Castle in Hampshire, the ancestral home of the Earls of Carnarvon. The third Earl built the present Castle, but it was his son, the fourth Earl (1831 – 90), who in his second term as a Tory Secretary of State for the Colonies achieved notoriety as the man who, through his policies of the enforced confederation of South Africa, indirectly caused the Boer Wars.

Earl of Carnarvon ('Twitters')

Carnarvon was clearly not a man to be trifled with. In January 1864 he had a number of fliers printed and circulated to his neighbours, informing them that 'the want of definite regulations for  admission to or through' his park had obliged him to revise the 'rules'. One of those who received a flier* was the Rector of Highclere, Philip Menzies Sankey, a graduate of Oxford who claimed among his friends, the influential proto-aesthete, Walter Pater. Presumably Rev. Sankey had been obliged to traverse the park in order to get to his church and so a copy of the new 'rules' that governed access would have been useful. Unfortunately, Sankey’s copy of the amended rules, together with his pass-card, which were originally included with the flier, are now missing, which means that we don’t know what these new rules were. However,  I’m sure that 'Twitters', Carnarvon’s nickname on account of his various nervous tics, was scrupulously fair to his neighbours.

Today, of course, the impecunious current Earl of Carnarvon has the well known musical composer Baron Lloyd-Webber of nearby Sydmonton House as his very wealthy neighbour. And it was Lord Sydmonton who, not long ago, offered to buy Highclere Castle and its land to prevent the Earl from building houses between the Castle and his home. Not surprisingly, the Earl stoutly refused the offer and ever since relations between the aristo and the arriviste have remained strained.[RMH]


* Dear Mr. Sankey. So much inconvenience has of late been experienced that the want of definite regulations for admission to or through the Park, that I have found it necessary to revise the existing rules.

I have endeavoured so to frame them, that whilst
henceforward preventing all confusion and irregularity, they
shall at the same time not interfere with any of the facilities
which may contribute to the personal convenience of my
Neighbours, and which it has always given me so much satis-
faction to afford them.

I have enclosed a copy of the revised rules, and it will
give me much pleasure, in accordance with No. 5, to place a
pass-card at your disposal, if you will bc good enough to let
me know your wishes.

I enclose you at once a card [?]--- [Believe me?] Yrs truly Carnarvon

Leigh Fermor on Gathorne-Hardy

This obituary for minor Bloomsburyite Eddie Gathorne-Hardy fell out of a book by his sister Anne Hill (of Heywood Hill) Trelawny's Strange Relations (Mill House Press, Stanford Dingley 1956) and was presented by her to Alan Ansen, the Athens based writer and member of William Burroughs literary circle.  The obituary article on EGH was written for The Times by Patrick Leigh Fermor (a xerox with inked notes by Anne Hill.) It appears not to have been published and is an excellent example of Paddy's great prose:

It would be said of no-one but Eddie Gathorne-Hardy that he belonged with equal fitness to the pages of White's Natural History of Selborne and the Satyricon of Petronius. Further analogies, with correct instinct but a few decades too early, could be sought in Valmouth and South Wind, but found to a split second in date, mood and intention in Vile Bodies, and though the brief intemperance of his Oxford days and the scrapes and festivals of the young and the bright in the 'twenties London gave him an aura which never quite faded, it was a figure of strong intellectual substance and authority that vanished from the scene on June 18th.